It seems that this is being viewed in the context of AI. There is a danger that people assume that the only way to do something is the way we do it. This is t

It seems that this is being viewed in the context of AI. There is a danger that people assume that the only way to do something is the way we do it. This is the "Your flying machine won't work because it doesn't have feathers" argument. Or more formally Entity X has property Y. Property Y is utilized to achieve property Z Entity A does not have property Y Therefore A does not have property Z (birds have feathers, birds use feathers to fly, Planes don't have feathers, planes can't fly) It is possibly worth pointing out that the word by word construction aspect of a LLM also cannot be used to eliminate the possibility of any form of consciousness. It would merely indicate that the generation of a response may be a series of very short term transient consciousnesses. Later tokens would just be new conscious 'instants' but with the context of the previous response. This is easy to see because the dividing line between instants is clear. If you turn it around and ask how do we know that we are not doing the same thing ourselves, it's too unclear to come up with an answer. Is you with a memory of yesterday the same as yesterday you? These are not new questions and rather than coming up with satisfactory answers we have managed to make the puzzle deeper by asking awkward questions like "what about transporters?" Sci-fi has explored these ideas quite a bit(Will Riker and Thomas Riker). Given the Star Trek reference I'll also do a mini rant about Discovery. The episode where they pick an arbitrary criteria, dreaming, as being a special property to be accepted as being an allowable person, is almost precisely this fallacy wrapped in a model of an established order dictating that 'what we have' is right. That they tried to deliver this as a parable of a minority being 'seen' makes it tragically ironic.